The only marketing split that doesn’t work is 100% gather, 0% hunt. Most UK B2B budgets are running it anyway.
Most of your marketing spend is doing what worked last year. That isn’t wrong — it’s incomplete. The line item that’s missing is the one that finds the customers your current channels never reach. Eight short cards, in plain English, on what the gap is and how to close it.
01
Most bees follow the dance. About 20% don’t. That’s why the colony survives.
When a honey-bee scout finds a good patch of flowers, it returns to the hive and dances the direction. Most foragers follow the dance. About a fifth of the colony ignore it and fly off in random directions. In a good year, those bees look wasteful. In a bad year — when the known flowers fail — those are the only bees that find the next field. Marketing budgets work the same way. The pounds that look least efficient today are the ones that find next year’s customers.
~20%Scout share in a healthy colony
Seeley, Honeybee Democracy — the share of scouts that keeps a colony alive across seasons.See the evidence
The bee colony is the textbook example of the trade-off between working known sources (the waggle dance) and searching for new ones (the rogue foragers). Ad guru Rory Sutherland often references the work by Viswanathan (Nature 1999) on Lévy-flight search and Seeley on honey-bee scout / recruit ratios — both find that healthy colonies keep a steady minority of scouts at all times, not just when the known flowers fail. The same ratio shows up across foraging species and across search-under-uncertainty models. A colony where every forager follows the dance starves when the patch is empty. The colony that finds itself short of food in a bad season is always the one that cut the scouts when food was plentiful.
Sources
Rory Sutherland on Sutherland & the explore / exploit trade-off
Viswanathan et al. — Optimizing the success of random searches (Nature, 1999)
Thomas D. Seeley — Honeybee Democracy
02
Most UK B2B marketing budgets are pure gathering. The split is the problem.
Gathering is the work you already do — Google Ads, LinkedIn, SEO, retargeting, the digital playbook that’s been reliable since 2010. It works, you can defend it on a dashboard, and most of your budget belongs there. The only split that doesn’t work is the one most UK B2B companies are running: 100% gather, 0% hunt. Hunting — reaching out to named decision-makers your dashboard doesn’t already know — is the line item missing from most marketing plans.
If you’ve played MMORPGs, you’ll recognise the grinding-vs-exploring trade-off — same idea, same trap. Grinding the known map is reliable. The next big find is somewhere you haven’t walked yet.
See the evidence
The pattern shows up consistently in UK B2B channel-mix data. Digital channels — search, paid social, retargeting, SEO — take most of the marketing budget because they are measurable, defensible, and reliable. They are the gatherer’s mix. But the whole budget sits on channels owned and run by middlemen (Google, Meta, LinkedIn) whose incentives are increasingly to keep the user inside their platform rather than send them to the advertiser’s website. The result: a budget that’s 100% in lanes the marketer doesn’t own and can’t control, with nothing in lanes that work differently. Adding a hunter’s allocation — even a modest one — protects against a single-channel failure and finds customers the digital playbook can’t see.
Sources
Bain & Co — B2B channel-mix research
March, J. G. — Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning (1991)
Sutherland on monoculture marketing
03
Working the known channels harder produces less, not more — once the channel has changed shape.
The digital playbook may be delivering less than it did. A companion Corpdata briefing, Are You Getting Fewer Clicks?, sets out what is changing: in early 2026, nearly 7 in 10 UK searches ended without a click, the highest of six countries measured, and in the only controlled experiment published so far, people clicked through to websites about 40% less when Google showed an AI Overview. Pushing harder on a thinner channel can cost more for less. And the 95% or so of buyers who aren’t shopping in a given quarter never see your search ads — they only see the businesses that come to them.
69.5%UK searches ending without a click, early 2026
~40%fewer clicks to websites when an AI Overview appears
~5%of business buyers in the market in any one quarter
The squeeze on the gatherer’s mix: fewer clicks coming out of the same searches, and only a small share of buyers searching at all.See the evidence
SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb’s desktop and mobile panel found that from January to April 2026, 69.5% of UK searches ended without a click on anything — the highest of the six countries measured. It is the first UK figure from this source, so it shows a level rather than a trend. In the only controlled experiment published so far, run in the US in early 2026, people clicked through to websites about 40% less when Google showed an AI Overview. And the B2B Institute’s rule of thumb is that something like 5% of business buyers are in the market in any one quarter. None of these figures describes any one business, and your own traffic may be holding up. What they suggest is that a pound spent on being found may buy less than it used to, and that spending more on the same channel is unlikely to put that right.
Agarwal & Sen — The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience: Evidence from a Field Experiment, SSRN working paper, July 2026
LinkedIn B2B Institute / Ehrenberg-Bass — The 95-5 Rule
04
A letter, a call, a named-recipient email — they signal something a banner ad cannot.
The recipient can see the work. A named letter that arrives on their desk took real effort to send. So did a phone call. So did a personalised email. The effort itself is the signal — it tells the buyer your business chose them on purpose. A banner ad signals the opposite: that you bought a slot on a list of people who fit a profile.
If gold-rush imagery lands better than bee colonies, call it prospecting versus mining. Mining is taking value from a known seam — reliable while it lasts. Prospecting is going to look for new ground. You need both. Most UK B2B marketing is all mine and no prospect.
4.4%Direct mail response
0.12%Email response
0.04%Display ad response
DMA UK Response Rate Report — like-for-like B2B response rates. The signalling premium is the gap between direct-access channels (mail, email) and broadcast (display).See the evidence
A named letter, a personal email or a phone call all take effort the recipient can see: a real address, a real name, a real timing decision. That effort says “we chose you.” A banner ad says the opposite: that the advertiser bought a slot on a list of people who fit a profile. The Direct Marketing Association’s UK response benchmarks show the gap on like-for-like methods: direct mail at 4.4%, email at 0.12%, display advertising at 0.04%. Direct mail in particular keeps around a 90% open rate — envelopes get opened in a way banner impressions never get viewed. The numbers get sharper still when you can choose exactly which named decision-maker you reach.
Sources
DMA — Response Rate Report
Sutherland on signalling and costly-effort signals in B2B
Spence — signalling theory, Nobel Prize 2001
05
Most marketers already know this. What’s missing isn’t the opinion — it’s the words.
If you’ve read this far, the argument isn’t new. You can feel the digital playbook is producing less. You can see the AI Overviews on your own search results. You know the channels are getting more crowded. The gap isn’t knowing — it’s doing. And what most companies need isn’t a different opinion. It’s the words to say it out loud in the budget meeting. Direct access is the words: a verified named list, by post or email or phone, sitting alongside the digital that already runs.
See the evidence
Pfeffer & Sutton (2000) called this the knowing-doing gap: companies regularly know what they should do and fail to do it, not because the diagnosis is unclear but because acting means changing a budget, changing a reporting line, or starting a conversation no-one wants to start. The IPA / FT Board-Brand Rift study found that 83% of UK business leaders believe marketing contributes to the bottom line — but more than half rate their own knowledge of brand-building as average or poor. The board votes on gut feel because nothing else is in front of them. This briefing’s job is to give you the words — not the data. You’ve already absorbed the data in your own way.
Sources
Pfeffer & Sutton — The Knowing-Doing Gap (Harvard Business School Press, 2000)
IPA & FT — The Board-Brand Rift
06
The marketing pound that goes furthest is the one most owners aren’t spending.
The pounds you spend on Google Ads work, but they work the way everyone else’s pounds work — in the same auction, against the same competitors, on the same channel. The pounds you spend reaching named decision-makers directly — by letter, email, or phone — work harder right now because almost no-one else is spending them. Same total budget, different mix, more bang for your buck. The mix matters more than the total in 2026.
07
You don’t need a big budget. You need a controllable one.
Direct access doesn’t run on an auction. Every pound goes to a verified named contact you’ve chosen. No platform tax. No black-box algorithm taking a cut. You pick the sectors, the company sizes, the job titles. You dial it up when cash flow allows and dial it down when it doesn’t. One pound, one contact — the maths is simple, and the levers are yours.
08
Direct access to the customers you actually want — on terms you control.
The hunter’s allocation needs a way to reach customers that doesn’t go through Google or LinkedIn. Direct access is that way: a verified named list of the UK decision-makers you want as customers, reachable by post, email or phone. No auction, no platform tax. Every contact is one you chose. Corpdata supplies the list; you set the mix; the digital channels you already run keep running underneath. The hunter’s allocation isn’t a replacement — it’s the line item that completes the mix.
See the evidence
Corpdata supplies continually verified UK B2B contacts with an average record age of just 94 days, backed by the 2-for-1 Goneaway Guarantee. Every record carries the named decision-maker, postal address, direct dial where we hold it, and email where we have it. The data is licensed for UK B2B direct marketing. Corpdata is on the ICO public register (Z5404661), and full audit trails sit behind every selection.
Sources
Corpdata — 94-day average record age; 2-for-1 Goneaway Guarantee
ICO registration Z5404661 — public register
Tell us what would make this worthwhile.
Tell us the outcome you want — new customers, revenue against a target, a sector you want to open up — and a bit about your business. We come back with a direct-access plan: who to reach, how, and what it costs. Homework done before we talk.
